Into the cauldron

Down, into the cavern, the psyche, the Underworld; so Samhain, and the dark half of the year, spins us down to our essential selves. 

Asks of us, how will you serve what sleeps now, and will rise again in spring?

Like our plant relatives, like the landscape, like everything that ages, we wither. A part of us sinks down and in, revealing the bones that have lain beneath the long seasons of growing, flowering, fruiting. 

If we have nurtured our gardens, the seeds of another harvest lie scattered over the ground, shaken by the North winds. Waiting in the last, fading light before darkness falls; to be held by the sheltering earth through the long months of ice, snow, killing cold.

Remember this night: There are witches, and there are witches. 

Beware, sisters, which paths you choose to walk. 

Will it be muttered curses, crabbed thoughts, and casting a metaphorical evil eye? 

Humanity can be so very disappointing, after all, and we may be so frustrated with unfolding realities, that this seductive, thorny path may seem to be the one where we hold more power. I speak from experience.

Rather, instead of casting maledictions, will we ask ourselves some version of the questions: How can I serve the Earth? How can I serve life? Using the gifts I have been given, what can I do to heal and help, and imagine the world the way it could be? 

How can I make more of what I love, and less of what I do not?

We all have the other kind within. (A proper cackler, I mean.) Yes, a Crone is meant to be fierce. But, fierce in service of something important, something life-giving, something that matters.

Wisdom whispers, perhaps we want to call up our most fierce powers to serve that which we love most, and to change that which ruins, harms and destroys. ???

Here, let me remind you about the Cailleach — the divine Crone who reigns over winter, beginning as I write, at Samhain. Who shapes mountains with her hammer. A creator and a destroyer, like every crone goddess. A fierce carlin who bestows sovereignty, and, with a fine sense of justice, punishes those who take too many lives of the wild creatures sacred to her.

Know you that a Crone's eye pierces any disguise or intent. 

She sees clearly, judges sternly but fairly, and — like most old women, and winter itself — does not suffer fools gladly. 

The Crone guides the young. Protects the defenseless. Rights the balance. 

Ever, the Crone serves life (as death also serves life) — which is as it must be, as all of us must do, in order for all of life to flourish once again on this Earth. 

Isn't that what we all long for? For life to flourish once again? Inside ourselves, in our spirits, and flowing outward to heal every inch of this planet?

Perhaps this is why witching myself feels like beginning to rewild myself. A profound gift as we head into winter, a seed I can hold in my heart, in the darkness. 

We are nurtured by seeking out wild ways of knowing. Feeling into Earth ways, with their vast power to mend our wounded selves and our wounded planet. 

The way I somehow eased into a softness toward my gardens this year, trusting the plants to find their own way, reseed where they will. Giving the plants time and space to do what they know far more than I how to do: express their intelligence, their ways of being. 

This is an Earth way. 

Because our beloved Earth is the opposite of a minimalist. You must scatter millions of seeds, not only one. You must plant endless forests of trees, continents of prairies, a world of oceans. She is brilliantly, magnificently, endlessly, fecund and creative. 

Let us recognize her always in ourselves...and ourselves, always in her. 

So, on Samhain, there are witches...and there are witches. As we sink down into the mysteries of the Crone's dark womb, here is my spell and blessing...

May we rest deeply in this cauldron of darkness. 

May we dream of possibilities, as seeds do. 

May we trust in what is rich and strange in ourselves and others. 

May we let the wild reclaim even the smallest inch of our fallow ground ... and slowly, slowly, awaken it to flower again. 

 

What I remember

On the eve of Imbolc, I feel like my candle is unlit.  

 

At this time of year, I long for a sense of kindling. A feeling that the world is inviting me. But all is quiet.

 

The Northern winter is long; a test, really. It tests our patience as we wait for the world to unfold in its own time. It tests our belief that from the grayness we, too, can rise green and new, like the eternal springtime.

 

When we see only the cloud-thick skies of winter, we cannot notice how the light is growing. 

From our rooms, we cannot notice how the Bald Eagle and Great Horned Owl already nest in the tallest white pines and cottonwoods. 

 

But, seen or unseen, we know that Earth manifests all in its right time. Including our Selves.

 

A sacred sun burns deep inside each of us. So I believe. Some call it spirit, or divinity, or life force.

Sometimes we feel the flames leaping. Other times, it may burn so quietly. And in the depths of a winter of the soul, we may worry that the fire has flickered out. 

 

We may not know that slow, quiet transformations are happening within us, which cannot be measured. Or understand how to unravel the messages we send ourselves in dreams, or synchronicities, or patterns. 

We may hear a voice saying that perhaps we are too old, or too worn out, to be renewed; that our story has somehow ended, without our even being aware of it.

 

But then we are reminded. Are we not made of this constantly renewing Earth? Yes. Of the same essence as the clouds, the crow, the ice, the snow. 

 

We know then that our lives are not small, but enormous … shapeshifting, unfolding, flaming, throwing light all around us. Ever-renewing.

 

This is what Imbolc helps me to remember. 

The green fuse

Now comes Bealtaine, following close on the heels of the snows.

Now comes the great flush of life unleashed from long months bound deep in ice: muskrat pouring through fresh-thawed waters, common loon and  trumpeter swan riding south winds to boreal lakes, the rise of the yellow warbler calling sweet, sweet, I'm so sweet. 

Mallard pair feeding side by side in the water meadow along the creek. Great Horned Owls roost in a tall willow, guarding their adolescent owlet, still tawny fuzz. Raccoon in twilight flowing up the stucco of neighbor's garage and in through the opening in the window frame, where she may be raising kits.

Everything swishing, splashing, rushing, shaking off the shackles of winter and hurrying to claim breeding territory, find food, arrange the world more to their liking.

Warm winds, changeable cloud stretched in streamers. Soft gray fur of the pussy willow. Whistle of the cardinal, the last full moon of April shedding her radiance on the mortal world like the Queen of the May.

New buds held tight, pointed green origamis bobbing tenderly in the wind. Browns of winter threaded with small green, a salad of golden caterpillar catkins, crisp willow leaves, soft moss and rolled, purple-green spears of bloodroot.

Following the travels of a pilgrim walking the Old Way to Canterbury, who ended his pilgrimage at dawn today by the edge of the sea. A stained glass journey in song, words and dreamlike images of the countryside, its sacred wells. Waymarkers, holloways, spirals of shell-fans with bone china ridges. A book of holy days, with the tale ending (or beginning?) on the great pagan fire festival as the rising tide of life is renewed, remade, released into the wild air to reanimate the earth.

I kindle no hilltop fire today but in my heart. I smell no blossom but in memory. Yet I light a candle for the holy day.

This morning's rain clouds shall pass as warmer air blows in from the south this afternoon. What I will pack for a ramble to observe this day: the lovely book I'm reading, notebook and pen for nature jottings, the last of the trail mix. And a reverence for spring, whose red-winged blackbirds float over waterlands, calls ringing through the cattails as they claim each moment of this fast-slipping life for their own.

The undying fire

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

—The Shortest Day, Susan Cooper

How it seems that as one grows older, people and times distant take on a glow of solstice fires. 

When you were in that experience, with those people, you had no thought it would come to an end. That your life would not ever expand outward into the world. That loved ones would fall away. That you would somehow—wandering a maze of seemingly disconnected blind turns—dead-end; not at the center but in an edgeland inhabited only by ghosts.

If you had known where your turns would lead you, would you have followed a different path? Useless thoughts, yet the question will be asked.  

Accept that this is your journey, every blind step of it. You are here. There is no "supposed to," only where you are.  Do you trust that is so?

But still, dear friends, I wish we could be together once more around the solstice fire. 

The shape of the celebration was never so important as that you and I were there together, laughing, as the living sparks flew up into the deep night like wishes, and the white owl watched in silence.

Bealtaine

Leaping fire on the hill

How I want to bound and burn like you, like every wild thing:

Rabbit, deer, horse, fox

The green spirit.

Leaping fish in the lake

How I want to bathe in that clear cold water

Revive my withered spirit 

Let go the pains I hold onto

Be baptized with joy

Be the joy to which the rushing waters give birth

and give birth to a river of joy

Dive into the depths of creation

without fear

Flash through the shallows, 

Swim hard upstream

Leaping forth every spring for an eon

Transform shape

wear down rock

Sublimate into mists and vapors 

then rain to earth in the Great Circle

as water begets more water and more life.

Leaping bird from branch

Wings dancing with sky

Tattoo over my heart, 

Forever winging into happiness

Bluebirds mean happiness

Every bird is like May

Bright, quick, throbbing with life

Singing gladly, wings outstretched

Carrying our wishes on their backs,

Our hopes in their feathers, 

Our dreams in their songs.

Leaping green from earth

How I long to rise like the plant people

A root, a seed

Ever-renewed, springing from the cracks

Useful, lusty, persistent and full of gifts

The bloom like the May, buzzing with bees

Green (the faerie color)

Hawthorn (the faerie tree)

May: The color of the dream world, the Otherworld as it calls, 

Stretches out flowering tendrils, 

Beckons with ever-young fingers to mortal kind

The greenling spirit of the earth reborn

And oh, little lover of fairytales and spring,

How the sap surges still 

in this young-old heart.

Thousand year forest

In the thousand year forest, Brigid's serpent ripples forth from earth's womb, and tastes the wild air with her tongue.

This wind, it tastes of mid-winter: the matings of eagles and owls, frost flowers blossoming over iced river edges.

Goddess of Fire and Creation, let me say that somewhere not here, yet living deep inside me, is a sacred grove; a wild and holy presence.

Somewhere inside that grove lives a wild woman, in wordless conversation with the eternal forest.

Her mystery is mine, have I forgotten?

The forest is inside always; its ways strange, though we think we know them. We think we know ourselves also, and that is the quickest way to lose the deepest mystery of our beings, which is unknowable.

Unknowable.

Are we not, somewhere, carrying inside still the mystery of the humans we once were—the mystery shared by every wild creature, embodied fully through fur, scales, feathers and skin?

Wordless; but speaking through the magic of grace, power, movement and gesture.

Eternal; yet beautiful in our earthiness and mortality.

Nationless; belonging only to the earth.

Entranced by and afraid of the flame.

Called by dreams, moved by unfathomable intuitions.

Conversing with creation through hand, eye, nose, ear and feet that caress the ground as we dance.

Sea changing, blood coursing to tides of joy, sadness and desire, and to the moon in the wide sky.

.

At times when I must hold in my thoughts, my objections, my anger, my grief and even my truth, even then I am still a wild dancer through this life.

Remember.

How this dance embodies that eternal mystery...which is what art is for.

Walking through the longest night

One of my wishes for our new home is that I will be able to see much more of the sky than just a meager patch of it through houses, tree branches and electrical lines.

I wish I could see what the moon, stars and the sun are doing, every day. How sad I feel, thinking of how many years of sunsets and moonrises have come and gone with nary a Me to admire them and praise them for their splendor.

I bought a lunar calendar for the new year. To remind me which phase happens when, to help focus my attention, I thought.

But now I recognize this is very sad; because if I could just look at the moon, like humans have looked at it for millions of years, I wouldn't need a calendar to tell me what phase it is in.

I could look up and see for myself.

Such a simple gift it seems, to be able to see the moon and stars in the sky! How could something once so ordinary have become rare and precious? It seems yet another loss in a time of losses.

If by walking the earth we can bless it with our feet, then by watching the sky we can bless it with our sustained gaze.

Is that how you watch the moon? Quietly but rapt, with eyes wide open, as if you gaze upon the beauty of your beloved?

Now I think that what I must have been seeking by purchasing that moon phase calendar was really a heart connection to the moon, a silver line of light between she and I, along which dreams and wordless mysteries would ebb and flow like tides.

What I was wanting most of all was the reassuring presence of the earth's beauty every day. I wanted the moon to be a companion to my nights, not shut away outside away from me but in my eyes and heart, like a prayer.

On this, the longest night of the year, may the moon creep into my dreams, may the low sun cast his birch-pale light over the wildwoods in my heart.

All things crooked and powerful

How gray and blustery it is, so suddenly and absolutely. As if a tempest is blowing in from some ghoul-haunted forest. The sun hides his face from us as we slip into the dark time: November.

Waiting Month, Month of Clouds, a time of stillness that in the north is foreboding, holding storms in its belly.

A time to remember the dead. Ancestors whose names I did not even know before this year, and those loved from childhood. My mother. My grandmothers. My sister. My aunties. My beloved cats.

A spirit for every golden leaf fallen from the silver maple.

Earlier in the day the dimness was lit by the inner lamps of yellow-green grapevine, coral pink creeper across my window, deep-gold coins of pear tree, fiery gold of crabapple with its bright red fruits.

Though even then, skeleton branches like fingers clutched their few remaining leaves, some grasping only sullen sky.

But the day has grown darker, more leaves blown to the ground and now I look to the candle's flame for remembrance. Fire for remembrance of all those bright, beloved lives hovering over my shoulder.

I keep this day. It deserves that I do so. I haven't always done, but I regret when I do not. I, at least, cannot both hold this day of between-worlds in my thoughts and go about my normal work day.

So this day, I choose to be here.

Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do. Thunder on my right hand. Lightning in my left hand. Fire above me. Frost in front of me.

—Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

I dug up a last unwanted elm seedling hiding amid the stems of my little Saskatoon serviceberry. Filled the bird bath and stored the garden hose in the garage. Put out suet for the woodpeckers, nuts for the jays and seeds for the dark-eyed juncos migrating through. I mulched leaves and left them to shelter whoever lives beneath them. 

It is a practical kind of ritual. 

Then the wind chased me inside. 

So many bright days have I gathered sunlight, landscapes flooded with beauty, breathing in the wind and pursuing quietness and solitude. Many lovely places have I visited, many a thought thunk, shared with no one but myself.

Now I am here with you and my musings, my broomsticks made of twigs marking me as a lover of all things crooked and powerful...messy, earth-wild and every shade of brown: leaf, pinecone, grasses, bark, branch, mushroom, acorn, seedpod, feather, muddy river, dark soil to which we all return. 

A female house sparrow had tucked a few strands of tawny grasses into the window well beneath the air conditioner, planning a snug spot out of the weather. (My only clue such activities were taking place was that the cats had been sitting side by side, staring intently at the window for two days.) 

We saw her flutter to the window with more grasses, only to find the air conditioner gone and the storm window closed. She clung to the window frame with her tiny claws and stared, quite understandably bewildered to find that her alcove was no longer accessible. No longer the safe spot she imagined.  

My regrets, little sparrow. I wish you well snuggled in to another cozy spot by now. 

All this is to say: Winter is coming. We draw inward, we hurry through the landscape, we huddle by the fire. We turn to all the tasks and occupations we've neglected for months in our great push to fill ourselves up with sunlight, petals, planting, traveling, outwardness. 

Shakespeare wrote, "The bright day is done, and we are for the dark." 

Terry Tempest Williams wrote, "Do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive." 

I write, blessings to you who feel darkness weighing on you like a mourning cloak. 

Embrace this season as a time for rest, a time of slowing down and the healing of slow-mending wounds; the feeding of hungers unrecognized and unacknowledged amid the bright hum of doing. 

Let us have the perceptiveness to see all the ways in which we have grown since the last turning of the sun, and to take encouragement from that—especially in dark November. 

For myself, I call to the owl, whom I have never found, though I have searched. 

Be my guide, owl, you who sees in darkness what others cannot. 

Teach me, you who consumes what is needed and purges what is not. 

Call to me, you who flies on silent wings, bridging the gap between this world and the Other, a being of mystery and magic. 

I ask the earth that it may be so. 

On Lughnasadh

Today I found the feather of a wild turkey.

Broken-stemmed—as if after falling to the ground, it had been chewed. Maybe by the orange-eyed black cat that prowls our yard after darkness falls, sending Stazi and Juni intently scurrying from window to window to exchange stares with the interloper.

What does a broken feather mean today, on the eve of the festival of Lugh, sun god?

I'm not one for signs and portents. But we curate our own lives, don't we? Especially for blog posts. We choose what is meaningful and why.

On the one hand, there is a quite sensible reason for a wild turkey feather to be in my back yard...which is that a whole flock of them paid us a visit on Thursday. Two hens and fifteen young wild turklings.

They perched atop the fence, the garage and up in the tree outside our window like an invading force. First: scoping out the yard for food and/or threats. Then: they judged it safe and one by one, fluttered down to peck at the fallen seed under the bird feeder.

After they'd eaten what was there, they wandered off to another yard, on a progressive dinner party.

Lughnasadh is a first fruits harvest festival, a time to partake of the bounty.

A banquet of milkweed and blazingstar for the monarchs.

A feast of nectar for bees and hummingbirds.

A feast of wild and winsome beauty for our eyes.

Seasons and holy days should be felt in their time, don't you think? The exact time is important. Their beats fall regularly throughout the year, marking a particular angle in the sun's journey across the sky, a quality of light falling upon the beloved earth; marking the cycle of growth and decline of mortal creatures of every kind. Anchoring us to this place, this time, singing nownownow every moment.

Centuries, millennia of humans marked the journey of sun and moon, marked them with fire and festival, ritual and thanks.

Sometimes I wish I lived among those peoples, in those times, if only for that. For a celebration with a center to it, one that makes sense to people who love the earth and the sky, sun moon stars.

No leaping over fires on hilltops, I'll shape my own kind of broken-feathered observance, based on what speaks to me.

As I write, I wonder, as I usually do: does this all sound self-indulgent? I understand if you think it does, because on some level I do, too. Compared with many people in this world, I am privileged, and have no real reason to complain of anything.

Is it a luxury to be able to feel emptiness, sadness or loneliness rather than hunger? Is it a luxury to long for a sense of belonging to this earth, when so many have no place to sleep, no safety, no kindness, no justice?

Yes. But maybe it's not an either/or, maybe we are less separate than we think. Maybe that's why many of us feel so lost. Maybe that is why we search and search for something with even a chance of healing what is being broken—and when we find it, we need to recognize and take hold of it.

There is so much in this society and the world that is destructive and cruel and callous, and it is nearly all human. We are the ugliest thing on earth, I think. So much of that is on display right now. It is so stark, so frightening, it demands our attention...and maybe we feel it is shallow or indulgent or selfish to care so much about what is beautiful.

But what if beauty is necessary, too? In spite of everything, we need to love what we love, or what is the point? This world's beauty is breathtaking still, the things that pass unnoticed under our eyes, the gifts of even one single day: the silent rising of the sun. The dawn chorus. The blue hours of a summer afternoon. The cool scent of a lake at dusk, magicked by the small singing of frogs and crickets. The bright stars we can barely see anymore, always above us, and a thousand thousand other wonders right here, every day.

If we could only see them. Honor them. With a holy day.

Thus we banish winter

On this, the first fire festival of the year, some alignment of time and energy helixed together, manifesting in my reading a book in which a character described Imbolg as "the kindling in the forest of winter."

Ahhh. Lovely.

Yet, a little strange. Since coincidentally, I was reading the book with the Kindle app, and on the festival of Imbolg.

As I read, a wistful feeling crept over me. I was wishing that I had felt up to attending the St. Brigid's/Candlemas ritual last week at the college where I once worked, instead of being down with a cold. The college was founded by the Catholic order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a community of women who are perfectly okay with acknowledging and even celebrating the pagan roots of Christian holidays and who conduct lovely if slightly earnest ceremonies with a touch of mystery.

~ ~ ~

In one ritual, I read elsewhere, she representing the Maiden sweeps deosil around the circle, symbolically brushing away the old and outworn.

Earlier today, again by coincidence, I performed a similar action. On hands and knees, I used a wet cloth to wipe up the accumulation of sand, salt and snowmelt just inside the back door. Juniper, my familiar, sat near me and watched the motion of my hand, circling around and around--every revolution sunwise, or deosil.

~ ~ ~

After the sweeping comes the chanting.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring,

say farewell to what is dead

and greet each living thing.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring.

I say the words aloud,  to myself. Just as I write this, I say them, for any who are listening to hear.

I am not burning incense, or anything else, yet I smell incense burning.

Strange and strange.

It is a hint of woodsmoke creeping in round the edges of my old window frames from outside on this fine, frosty night.

Or is it?

I need more magic in my life. I choose to think of this phantom whiff of sacred smoke as one more part of this Imbolg ritual I seem to have been participating in all day without even realizing it.

Until just now, as I wrote this.

Welcome, spring. Let the fire in the forest of winter be kindled.

A blessing of bones

LAST NIGHT, I was blessed by the Old Bone Mother.

In her old hands, she carried reindeer bones. Click! Clack! They rattled as she prowled through the dark stone cavern-space where we sat.

Bones scratched over scalps, rested over hearts as the Dreamers dreamed their way along twisting inner paths, anchored by the pulse of the Drummers.

In the Celtic lands She is the Cailleach. The Unmaker, the Uncreator, the Unwinder, the Remover. Her breath blows cold on the back of the neck in the Dark Time, She throws boulders that make mountains, She brings the fierce cold, She is an elemental force as She moves through this world, collecting what needs to be Taken.

She Takes.

(This was how the story was told to me: She Takes.)

Deep beneath the sacred mound of Sí an Bhrú, Newgrange, in a dark womb of a chamber, She sings as She knits together the bones of those and that which have been Taken, reshapes them to live again on the earth in new form.

Because of Her, nothing is lost to the world, not ever lost, not truly.

And in this space, where the Old Bone Mother paid a visit to the Dreamers, a trickster-shapeshifter-shaman of a man told us: "We are given two great gifts in life. The gift of being created. And the gift of being uncreated. Throughout time, throughout culture, how we respond to these two gifts becomes our religion."

The Cailleach's blessing is to take from us something that needs to go. It is too soon to know what is gone from me. So many things I no longer needed, that I wanted to push out the door like a houseguest overstaying her welcome by months or years.

Tears overflowed, silently. My heart overflowed, silently. This went on for a while. And then I felt at peace.

Last night, I was blessed.



Last night, the drum was alive under my palm. Though stored away for long years, it still had not forgotten how to sing, how to vibrate and shiver its skin in answer to my hand, resonating for long moments in the humming silence. I played the drum, the drum played me, for a moment all one and the same.

I have walked the passages of Newgrange, Sí an Bhrú, in body. A dozen years ago, in the springtime, when the lambs frolicked and the Cailleach slept.

Did the echoes of that mystery plant their seeds in me then? The potent magic of the Irish-green grass, the druid sun tracing gray stone spirals, the paradox of timelessness amid great age, those stay with me.

But if I am a drum, one beat was struck on me that day at Newgrange, resonating over years until the same hand last night struck me once again.

Maybe it is as he, the shapeshifter-shaman, said: "We are all Drummers on the Skin of Mystery."

Mystery is rattling in your ears, striking Her fists on your bones. When She strips you bare to scour you and refashion you, when you are uncreated and lose your identity, your trappings, your anger or your way, say to yourself it is a gift.

She Takes, and it is a gift.

Last night, this is how the story was told to me. And then, how I told the story to myself.

And now, I tell it to you.

Season of the Crone

HERE, ON THE doorstep of Samhain, veils of mist blur the edges between the end of one thing and the start of another. It has been that way all day; light rain dripping onto yellow maple leaves, then hanging suspended in the soft, damp air, hovering between heaven and earth.

Twilight falls. The mist grows deeper, spread over the land like the finest silver cloak, sifting down through the atmosphere. It beckons me.

Come. Let us speak to you, it whispers. This is a language you know in your bones. This is a borderland you know in your dreams and have known from the womb..

I feel close to the Crone these days. Not only in the turning of the year, but in the seasons of my own self, the power gathering for some purpose I cannot see. The Divine Feminine wants me to notice her. She speaks through the spider's web, the autumn mist, the living lines in my face. She speaks through the cycle of seasons, myth, symbol and story.

She speaks of the boundless fertility of the earth and her seasons of rest. The cycles of the watching moon. The Three Fates who spin the thread of life, measure out its length, and choose when to sever the thread. The Three Weird Sisters, in and out of time, straddling reality and the supernatural. Between the worlds.

To me, names like "witch" and "crone" seethe with power. Wisdom. Mystery. They invite me into a sisterhood as old as time.

I live in a bungalow, in a city, far from the countries of my ancestors. Far in time from the Old Ways. Yet, somehow...I feel akin to the witch-crone in her cottage. She lives somewhere inside me, of that I'm sure. There are the cats, after all.

Maybe our society's version of the crone in the cottage is the old woman who lives with her many cats...or the old woman who feeds the pigeons, or the old woman who scolds children and talks to squirrels, or the old woman who picks up litter in the park? Not necessarily evil, just...odd.

That is why this passage jumped out at me from a lovely book I just read:

"There was a movie I loved with all my childish heart: Thomasina. The title character was a cat that died and, with the help of a woman thought to be a witch by the townspeople, returned to tell stories of its nine lives. I never tired of the movie, for I identified completely with the unusual woman who lived deep in the woods, taking in hurt animals and healing them with patience and love. In my heart, I knew I would be a strange woman just like her someday."

Love that strangeness in yourself. Listen for the voice of a shape-shifting enchantress, who sounds like falling mist and looks like the fierce clutch of an owl's claw on its prey. I have a feeling this is a good time to hear her--witch, goddess, crone, hag, sorceress. Like a force of nature, like the turning of the year, she is more than we can put one name to.

Catechism for a Witch’s Child

When they ask to see your gods

your book of prayers

show them lines

drawn delicately with veins

on the underside of a bird’s wing

tell them you believe

in giant sycamores mottled

and stark against a winter sky

and in nights so frozen

stars crack open spilling

streams of molten ice to earth

and tell them how you drink

a holy wine of honeysuckle

on a warm spring day

and of the softness

of your mother who never taught you

death was life’s reward

but who believed in the earth

and the sun

and a million, million light years

of being

© 1986 J.L.Stanley

O, the merrye greengrass

How magical it would be to come across a Jack-in-the-Green or Morris Dancers in London today, on Beltane!

I'm told those very, very old traditions are celebrated in some towns, but not really in London anymore. (This despite the fact that a whole area of London is named after the Mayfair it hosted each year, until the well-to-do got fed up with the riff raff and sent the May Fair packing.)

All the same, by whatever name he is called, the Greenman strides in his leafy cloak down London's streets and across its squares and parklands, heath, hill and vale, lighting each tree with green fire...coaxing the fat candles of magnolia trees into pale flame, whispering the songs of growing to every tender blade of grass, each leaf, each heart.

Today, I left the city for the Heath, where I heard the sound of nothing but the wind and birds calling as they winged overhead.

Even through the soles of my shoes, I felt the blessed moisture of the grass, the soft give of the turf, so cool and sweetly scented. I walked over tussocks of grass growing in whorls and cowlicks, rippling in the wind, following its own wild order.

Atop Kite Hill, hair swirling in the wind, I may have thought myself Catherine Earnshaw on Wuthering Heights for a moment...the passionate girl who drank in the air of the heights and smells of the heather like nourishment. Heather...heathen...hmm.

Then I descended into rolling hills of woodland, trickles of tiny streams, and snags...the homes of owls, rabbits, foxes, and hedgehogs, ducks and crows and inquisitive Blue Tits.

I relearned what I'd forgotten—that gorse flowers smell deliciously of coconut—and learned what I've not known until now: the delicate vanilla scent of one tiny blue bell.

And at the end of it all, my left knee burned from stinging nettle, my eyes itched from tree pollen, and I smelled like a cotton sheet hung to dry in the wind and sun. Glorious.

I leave you with the words of the Bard. Blessed May to all.

Under the greenwood tree 

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note 

Unto the sweet bird's throat, 

Come hither, come hither, come hither!

Here shall he see

No enemy 

But winter and rough weather.

—As You Like It